Document Management v.s. Knowledge Management

Justin Friedman Nov. 18, 2017

What is your team’s # 1 asset?

You may say it is your employees. True, but if you think about it more, it is really the knowledge and know-hows that your employees possess. Therefore, it is critical for teams to capture the knowledge and know-hows so they can be easily shared among team members and grow over time. Doing so also ensures that when employees leave the company, the knowledge does not leave with them.

OK, let’s do more documentation. But …

Traditionally, companies use document management system such as Alfresco, Sharepoint etc. to manage their knowledge, and later on, find out that they don’t really work. Good documentation requires a tremendous amount of effort and resources. But when a user needs one piece of information for a specific issue, it is very hard to find it in the sea of documents. And in today’s fast-changing world, documents go outdated really really quickly.

Micro-documents

If you use StackOverflow, you know why you love it. Comparing AllAnswered with systems such as Sharepoint is like comparing StackOverflow with the long, thick user manuals that nobody really reads. AllAnswered captures your team knowledge using what they called Micro-documents which include questions and answers, short blogs, ideas and polls etc. So each post is a bite-sized information that targets one specific knowledge. Here is an example of a typical post.

Power of communities

Just like Slack using channels for team communication, AllAnswered leverages the power of communities to capture and grow team knowledge. You can create a community for a project, a group or a common interest. A community can be open or private just like a Slack channel. Any team member can join open communities, but private communities are by invitation only. A team can have multiple admins and each community can have multiple moderators.

Integrated with your work flow

Another thing you will like about AllAnswered is that it is integrated with email and Slack, tools that you use all the time. Each community can be mapped to a specific Slack channel and the setup is a breeze.

Once you set it up, your team will see new posts from AllAnswered right in your Slack channel.

Awesome!

Yes, indeed. If your team is still using the wrong tools to manage team knowledge, give AllAnswered a try. You will see the difference.